Do you currently use Amazon as a revenue stream for your business? You might be selling a huge range of products. You might be selling massive quantities of goods. You might be selling to hundreds of different countries with all sorts of regulations and laws – and you might have to deal with several different third-party companies to get your goods out to your customers.
We’ve put together some of the best apps and integrations for businesses selling through Amazon that can help you automate and improve how you run your business – from accounting and taxes through to stock, sales, and product research.
Apps for accounting
Any business with a healthy number of sales needs a good accounting system, and for most Amazon sellers, we’d recommend Xero or Quickbooks Online.
But if you want to avoid the error-prone hassle of manually entering data from Amazon into your accounting system, you’ll need to find a way to automate the connection between them.
Before you can do that, you need to look at how you’re using Amazon. In particular, there are two questions you need to ask:
- Does my business mostly rely on FBA (Fulfilled By Amazon)?
- And is Amazon my only sales channel?
If you only sell through Amazon (and only use FBA), we’d recommend taking a look at A2X.
A2X is a direct integration between Amazon and Xero that covers both the sales you make and the fees you pay. It can batch together a full day’s worth of sales and fees before bringing it over to Xero (which makes things incredibly simple for high-volume sellers), and can help you to produce accurate and detailed management reports.
If you only sell through Amazon (but you don’t use FBA much), we’d recommend a system like Cin7 or Stitch Labs.
These systems can handle the shipping information for each individual order, and they also use API and EDI integrations to create a direct link with your third-party logistics (3PL) companies. If you’re not using FBA, these systems will help you to automate your external shipping and logistics.
And if you’re a full-on eCommerce business (where Amazon is only one of your sales channels), things get a little more complicated.
You might have multiple sales channels, multiple different systems and integrations, and multiple forms of fulfilment and logistics.
There simply isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach that we can suggest. So in these cases, we’d recommend getting the help of a cloud accounting consultant like BlueHub.
Apps for staying on top of your taxes
Once you’ve got your Amazon account linked up to an accounting app, it’s time to start thinking about taxes.
Avalara Trustfile can help you to cut down the time spent preparing and filing your sales tax returns, with online filing and a detailed FBA (Fulfilled By Amazon) Inventory Report.
It can sync with your sales data, and give you useful reminders and notifications to help you make sure you’re doing everything on time.
Similarly, TaxJar can link directly to your Amazon account, pulling all the information it needs to help you track and process your sales and sales tax.
Apps for managing your orders and stock
There’s a huge range of apps and systems that can help you stay on top of your Amazon stock and orders. And as you’d expect from a huge company like Amazon, they all come with a quick and simple integration, linking up directly to your Amazon selling account.
- DEAR can sync up your products, customers, stock and sales seamlessly in real-time, with automatic order processing and stock updates as they happen.
- Cin7 can import your entire product range from Amazon, automate your logistics and fulfilment, and share order statuses and tracking codes with your Amazon customers.
- Unleashed keeps both Amazon and itself completely up to date with your stock, customers, and products – with real-time visibility of your stock and in-depth Amazon sales reports.
And those are just the big ones. You’ll also find Amazon integrations for apps like Veeqo, Expandly, Inventory Lab, and more.
Apps for choosing products (and prices!)
As good as these accounting and stock apps are, there’s a whole world of other tough decisions to make when you’re selling on Amazon.
But luckily, there are loads of useful apps to help you make the right choices.
- Profit Bandit can scan any product’s barcode and assess the potential profit based on 15 different factors, such as Amazon fees, the cost of the goods, and the shipping costs.
- Scoutify (by Inventory Lab) can tell you the potential profitability of any item, as well as whether a certain item is restricted from being sold on Amazon. You can also see how many other Amazon offers there are for that same item, and your own personal sales and purchases of that item.
- FBAScan gives you an entire database of Amazon products and their prices on your phone, so you can instantly search for similar products wherever you are, with or without an internet connection.
- Jungle Scout gives you a complete product analysis, helping you to research promising new products, track their sales and revenue, compare qualified suppliers, and manage your promotions and customer emails when you finally launch your new product.
Feeling overwhelmed?
There’s a massive number of advanced apps that can help you automate and improve every area of your Amazon business. We’ve got a team of experts on hand to help you through it.
We’ve helped all sorts of businesses get to grips with their Amazon accounts – and we’ve got a long history of getting companies up and running with accounting and inventory software.
So if you don’t know what you need (or you know you just need some good advice), speak to one of our experts today – we’ll talk you through everything you need to make your Amazon business a success.